Towards a Better Future

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Chapter Ten: Professional Development in Teaching The Teaching Council’s Strategic Plan for 2015-17 included the establishment of a national framework for professional development as one of its four main goals. In March 2016, the Council launched Cosán: Framework for Teachers’ Learning. The Foreword to the Cosán document states: Cosán recognises that teachers are already committed to their professional learning. It acknowledges the many ways in which teachers have told us that they learn. It thus provides a clear and accessible framework for that ongoing professional learning to be recognised, in the context of teachers’ status as registered professionals. It also provides a clear context for new conversations to happen about teaching and learning, between teachers, parents, students, and all stakeholders. (Foreword) An important statement of the values underlying professional development for teachers is contained in Cosán. Among the values that are elucidated are: teachers as autonomous professionals; flexibility as a feature of the framework; facilitation of teachers in identifying and pursuing relevant professional learning opportunities; allowing for innovative approaches to quality assurance; opportunities to acknowledge and recognise teachers’ learning; and facilitating teachers in prioritising learning that benefits themselves and their pupils. In addition to the affirmation of educational values like these, the Cosán document recognises that teachers’ learning is not merely an up-skilling or functional matter; that it is a formative process involving a number of intermingling dimensions. These dimensions it identifies as: formal and informal, professional and personal, collaborative and individual, school-based and external. The document also stresses the importance of critical reflection in teachers’ professional learning and gives attention in short, numbered sections to each of the following: planning for learning and reflecting on its impact; standards to guide learning and reflection; and quality assurance processes. The final chapter envisages a development phase from 2016 to 2019, to be followed by an implementation phase commencing in 2020. LOOKING AHEAD The Cosán document provides a valuable context – in fact the key regulatory context – in which to consider the development of CPD policy and practice for teachers in Ireland. Its rationale marks a welcome contrast to the kinds of assumptions underlying more traditional approaches to ‘inservice’, such as the four identified in the opening paragraphs above. Despite its extended title, however, Cosán is less a framework than a first outline of the elements of an envisaged framework. It is important to recognise this; otherwise, some key matters that Cosán does not mention, or touches on only lightly, might be seen as structural gaps in the framework. In making provision for a three- — 159 —
Towards a Better Future: A Review of the Irish School System year developmental phase, Cosán allows for opportunities to concentrate minds on strategic matters. To the fore in such matters must be a careful thinking-through of the range of features necessary to make the framework a practicable and a fruitful one when it comes to implementation. What follows here is an attempt to engage constructively in such thinking-through. In this attempt, a number of headings are considered in turn. (a) A professional development spectrum At one end of such a spectrum might lie the minimum requirements for the amount of professional development teachers might be required to undertake over a given period to renew their registration. At the other end of the spectrum might lie the kinds of requirements that enable teachers to accomplish advanced levels of professional standing. While the former requirements would be obligatory for all registered teachers, the latter would be optional – viz. identifying professional development routes that teachers might elect to follow in pursuing such advanced standing. The kinds of courses needed to cater to this spectrum range from short courses provided under the auspices “ Designing a flexible career enhancement structure, a readily-understandable creditweighting system and a credible system of equivalences for such a spectrum is a necessary task to carry out in moving toward a fully-fledged framework for professional learning. ” of PDST or other national support agencies, to locally-organised courses that are submitted for accreditation through the Education Centres, to university-linked courses in the Education Centres, to Post-graduate Diplomas or M.Ed. degrees or indeed professional doctorates in the universities themselves. Designing a flexible career enhancement structure, a readily-understandable creditweighting system and a credible system of equivalences for such a spectrum is a necessary task to carry out in moving toward a fully-fledged framework for professional learning. (b) Accreditation of professional development The references under the previous heading to minimum requirements for renewal of registration, and to more advanced levels of professional accomplishment, point to an important conclusion: an accreditation system is an inescapable element of a framework for professional learning. In keeping with the values underlying Cosán, such an accreditation system would need to be a flexible one, recognising the kinds of autonomy and the degrees of autonomy that are inherent to teaching as a practice. It would also need to be an easily understood and transparent one. Developments in recent decades in the accreditation of prior learning (APL) and in the modularisation of study courses make the design of an accreditation system a much less daunting task than it would previously have been. It is now a common practice to recognise modules at different levels (i.e. quality) and to — 160 —
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Towards a Better Future

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